The Principles of Terror

Arguably the most successful act of revolutionary terror was the June 1914 assassination of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo.

Believing his mission to murder the heir to the Austrian throne had failed, Gavrilo Princip suddenly found himself standing a few feet away from the royal car. He fired twice, mortally wounding the archduke and his wife.

Tactically, that act of terror eliminated the reformist Ferdinand, who meant to address the grievances of his Slav subjects by granting them greater autonomy and equality with Austrians and Hungarians inside the empire.

Strategically, the assassination succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its Black Hand plotters.

Hard-liners in Austria demanded an ultimatum to Serbia. When her demands were not met in full, Vienna declared war. Czar Nicholas mobilized in support of Russia’s little Slav brothers. The Kaiser ordered mobilization. When the French refused to declare neutrality, Germany declared war. In hours, the British Cabinet had reversed itself to back war with Germany on behalf of Belgium and France.

Princip had lit the fuse that set off in six weeks the greatest war in history. While Serbia suffered per capita losses as great as any other nation, she ended the Great War as the lead nation in a Kingdom of the South Slavs embracing Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians, and Hungarians. The Habsburg Empire at which Princip had struck had vanished.

Last week’s Mumbai massacre seems a similar triumph of terror.

Tactically, by sending a platoon of suicide warriors into India’s financial capital, terrorizing a train station, two five-star hotels and a Jewish center, and killing nearly 200 in over 60 hours, the plotters assured themselves of round-the-clock worldwide television coverage.

In so riveting the world’s attention for four days, this terrorist atrocity was a success.

And by using Pakistanis to perpetrate the massacres and Karachi as port of embarkation, the plotters focused India’s rage exactly where they want it, against Pakistan. By this slaughter in India’s commercial capital, the Islamists have destroyed the detente Pakistan was seeking with India and pushed both toward war. Out to murder moderation and stoke militancy, the terrorists succeeded.

Years ago, this writer observed:

“Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If, as Clausewitz wrote, war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means.”

Yet terrorism — the killing of innocents for political ends — can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama. What, then, may we surmise are the tactical and strategic goals of the terror masters of Mumbai?

To humiliate, wound, and outrage India in her pride as a great new democratic and economic power in Asia. To imperil Mumbai’s future as a safe and secure financial capital in which to live, work, and invest. To awe the world and inspire Islam’s young by their audacity. To attain immortality.

But the strategic target of the militants is the Pakistani government.

Pakistan’s offenses? Cooperating with America in Afghanistan and the border region, battling al-Qaida and the Taliban, withdrawing from the fight for Kashmir, seeking peace with a Hindu nation where 170 million Muslims are denied their place in the sun.

President Bush should pray New Delhi does not adopt his Bush Doctrine of preventive war or the Cheney Doctrine: “Even if there’s just a 1 percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty.” For war in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan would be a calamity and a triumph for the terrorists across what Zbigniew Brzezinski has called the “Global Balkans.”

War would pit two nuclear powers against each other for the first time since the Sino-Soviet border clash of 1969. It would spawn bloodshed between Muslim and Hindu in India. It would see the collapse of Pakistan, its possible dissolution and a military dictator in a nation already divided against itself over whether to continue resisting al-Qaida and the Taliban, or cut ties to the unpopular Americans.

Wounded and enraged by the atrocities of 9-11, America lashed out, first at Afghanistan and the al-Qaida source of the conspiracy, then at Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Thus did the Bush administration disunite its nation and forfeit its mandate.

For India to lash out at a Pakistan that was not complicit in the Mumbai crimes against humanity, but harbors elements within that are guilty and are celebrating, would be as great a mistake.

India and Pakistan both have a vital interest in no new war.

But a new war is exactly what the terrorists killed for and died for.

Should it come, they win — and enter history as revolutionary terrorists alongside Princip and the perpetrators of 9-11.

It does seem obvious that the first response to terrorism should be to figure out what response the terrorist want, then do anything but that. Bush and Cheney essentially did everything bin Laden wanted them to… got embroiled in two Asian land wars and into debt to do so, following failed British imperial paradigms… indulged in belligerent ‘solidarity’ with Israel rather than taking the Palestinian issue off the table and blocking militant Islam’s highest road… violating civil liberties and Geneva conventions, and closing our highest road… failing to seize the opportunity for a strategic alliance with Iran, the natural regional hegemon. Hopefully the next administration will do better, it could hardly do worse.

Yep. The terrorists have gotten everything they’ve wanted so far– tidy bit of business. PJB needs to be required reading for anyone (including policymakers) who wants to know how the world actually works rather than how some pundit wants it to work.